Wildlife in Pixels

Digital Technologies Mediating Diverse Potentialities in Biodiversity Conservation

Bibliographic Data

ID7150813
AuthorsNaomi Millner (0000-0003-2114-6298, Geographical Sciences, University of Bristol, Bristol, UK, corresponding author)
Year2025
Volume23
Issue2
Pages92-97
Publication date2025-04-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueConservation and Society (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0972-4923 • E-ISSN: 0975-3133
PublisherOvid Technologies (Wolters Kluwer Health) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.4103/cs.cs_58_25
OpenAlexW4409921214
LanguageEN
Citations received1
References cited15

INTRODUCTION Imagine a world where the fate of endangered species is entangled with actions taking place on a digital screen, where the movements of elephants and tigers are tracked, gamified and transformed into entertainment. In such a scenario, conservationists and gamers alike cheer for the survival of charismatic megafauna, their success measured not so much by the thriving of ecosystems, but by the number of downloads and player engagement. In this brave new world, digital technologies promise to help bring about a significant turning toward more-than-human care and conviviality—yet they simultaneously risk turning wildlife into mere pixels—commodities detached from their broader relationships, within a virtual economy. This conundrum lies at the heart of questions raised in recent scholarship in political ecology, conservation studies and beyond: Can the gamification of wildlife enable the transformations in social and cultural practices that are needed to prevent species decline and biodiversity loss, or does it instead pave the way for a new form of digital extractivism, where the essence of life itself is repurposed for human consumption? What else changes through the use of technologies and experimentation with them? The article ‘Race the Wild: Encountering Non-Human Life Through the Gamification of Wildlife Movement’ by (Sandbrook et al. In press) offers an insightful contribution on the topic by exploring how digital games mediate human encounters with non-human life. The authors argue that the gamification of wildlife movement data could foster new forms of engagement with nature under certain conditions, potentially advancing conservation efforts. The contribution follows in the wake of other scholars by encouraging critical-minded scholars and publics to consider the importance of evolving digital technologies in conservation alternatives (eg., Goldstein and Nost 2022; Bersaglio et al., 2023). Terms like ‘data justice’, for example, point toward the capacities of drones, data and monitoring technologies for including Indigenous territorial rights or fostering modes of conserving biodiversity that strengthen community autonomies and visibilities (Sauls et al. 2023; Pritchard et al. 2022). In this commentary, I engage critically with the claims made in the article, while further developing the ethical, political, and economic implications of gamifying wildlife in conservation. By weaving in a series of examples—ranging from virtual ecotourism and augmented reality games to data colonialism—I highlight how digital technologies can create new opportunities for commodification and extractivism, often reinforcing neoliberal values in conservation practices. This supports my overall argument: there is nothing emancipating, per se, about gamification. There is a need to avoid both technological optimism and monolithic negativity in future engagements with digital technologies in conservation to trace and avoid new options for neoliberal takeover and the elaboration of geopolitical agendas through green ventures. Gamification and the mediation of nature: EVE online The concept of Nature 2.0, as articulated by Büscher (2014) and Fletcher (2017), provides a useful framework for understanding the mediation of nature through digital technologies and its relevance to changing logics of biodiversity conservation. The authors present gamification as a means of creating ‘digital spaces of human/non-human encounter’ (Sandbrook et al. In press) where players interact with real-time movement data from wild animals. In the section “Commodification and Carbon” of their paper (Sandbrook et al. In press), they explore, following Büscher and others, how gamification can oversimplify complex ecological relationships and reinforce a human-centric perspective, reducing non-human life to a set of metrics that can be manipulated within a digital interface. However, while the authors rightly conclude that digital games have the potential to enhance public engagement with conservation, it is crucial to consider the broader implications of this approach. For example, in their article on the politics of conservation landscapes Corson et al. (2014) highlight how conservation practices can often be co-opted by neoliberal agendas, transforming conservation from a socio-ecological endeavour into a commodified, market-driven enterprise. The gamification of wildlife movement risks perpetuating this trend, transforming the lives of animals into entertainment commodities within a digital economy. Following critical accounts of the “encounter value” fostered by neoliberal expressions of ecotourism—where tourists pay for a close experience with animals as part of for-profit ventures—such processes change what counts as nature and how biodiversity is valued. A pertinent example is EVE Online1, a popular online multiplayer game where players engage in resource extraction, economic activities, and territorial control within a vast digital universe (see Figure 1). In EVE Online, players mine virtual resources, often without consideration for the virtual ecosystems that contextualise them. This mirrors the risks associated with gamifying wildlife movement, where animals are reduced to data points, divorced from ecological contexts, and commodified into exchangeable units within a game. Just as EVE Online can encourage exploitative behaviour in a digital setting, gamification in conservation could similarly foster the commodification of non-human species or habitats, turning them into digital resources to be extracted and manipulated for entertainment and profit.Figure 1: EVE Online Screenshot, from: https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/equinox-expansion-notesA further illustrative example of this commodification can be considered in the form of “virtual ecotourism”. Companies like Google and National Geographic have developed virtual reality (VR) experiences that allow users to explore remote natural environments from the comfort of their homes. While these experiences can raise awareness about conservation issues, without avoiding the ecological cost of air travel and heavy tourist footfall, they also create new opportunities for commodification. Virtual ecotourism turns the experience of specific places and their more-than-human natures into a consumable product, detached from the actual ecosystems it represents. This reflects a broader trend in neoliberal conservation, where nature is increasingly valued for its ability to generate economic surplus rather than for its intrinsic ecological value. Human-animal relationships: Zooniverse’s Wildcam Gorongosa Parallelly, digital technologies, such as gamified wildlife tracking, have also been called powerful tools for engaging the public in conservation efforts. This claim aligns with wider work on citizen science, where technologies like sensors, drones, and smartphones have been shown to be instrumental in enabling communities to participate in environmental monitoring and conservation. Jennifer Gabrys (2016), for example, has highlighted how the proliferation of digital sensors through environments such as forests can democratise environmental data collection, allowing local and invested communities to become active participants in the creation of knowledge about ecosystems they curate. Similarly, my work on community drones demonstrates how these technologies can empower community governance of ecosystems as well as constitute alternative forms of authority that prioritise lived experience and territorial rights (Millner et al. 2024). We can develop the implication of these ideas through examining the interface of Zooniverse’s Wildcam Gorongosa2 (see Figure 2), a gamified platform where players (citizen scientists) can identify animals captured on camera traps in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park. This is an important example of how digital interfaces may empower citizen science and involve the public directly in wildlife conservation, building shared knowledge that fosters species care. Through this platform, users contribute to real scientific research, demonstrating how gaming can also help democratise data collection and enable deeper public engagement with wildlife conservation.Figure 2: Zooniverse’s Wildcam GorongosaHowever, such innovations also bring new challenges. As citizen science becomes increasingly intertwined with digital technologies, there is a growing risk that these tools may be co-opted by securitisation agendas and neoliberal governance frameworks. Rather than simply enhancing community-led conservation, the integration of digital technologies could potentially reinforce existing power imbalances, turning citizen scientists into data collectors for top-down surveillance systems. Moreover, such interactions may reinforce longstanding colonial imbalances, for example, in determining how citizen observations are logged, stored, and legitimised—or in which names (Latin, local language, English, etc.) are used to categorise the information. Thus, while the gamification of wildlife movement, as explored in the article, holds promise for fostering new forms of engagement, it also raises broader questions about knowledge, power, and expertise in biodiversity conservation. The ethical implications of gamifying wildlife movement on human-animal relations are a further concern we can explore through this interface. The authors of “Race the Wild” acknowledge that the elephants tracked in their experiment were unaware of their participation in the game, raising questions about the ethics of using animal movement data in this way. As they note, “the movement of the elephants was shorn of all its local social, political, and ecological context” (Sandbrook et al. In press), abstracting the animals from the complex realities of their lives in the wild. They link this with broader scholarship that indicates that game-playing does not really lead to an improved understanding of actual ecologies, and that players may remain fixated on their screens rather than their surroundings. Yet, they go beyond this point to suggest that by engaging with the movements of elephants in a game, players may develop a deeper connection with these animals and a greater awareness of their lives. There are significant limitations to this potential that warrant critical examination. To start with, the empathy generated through digital games may be superficial or even misguided. The lack of context to the elephants’ lives noted above may leave players to fill in the gaps with their assumptions and stereotypes about elephant behaviour. This lack of context raises concerns about the authenticity of the empathy being cultivated—are players truly connecting with the lived experiences of elephants and their singularities, or are they merely engaging with a sanitised, gamified version of these animals? As I, with others, have shown, digital technologies may also help produce stereotypical versions of humans in protected or biodiverse regions, such as, reproducing particular ideas of who or what a poacher looks like, supporting calls for greater military involvement (Millner et al. 2024). The focus on charismatic megafauna in these digital games also reinforces existing biases in conservation, as highlighted by Lorimer (2007). By selecting species based on their “raceability”, the gamification of wildlife movement data perpetuates a narrow focus on a few iconic animals, neglecting the broader ecological systems in which they exist. Moreover, using digital games to generate empathy risks reducing complex ecological relationships to simplistic narratives that players can easily consume. This critique echoes Haraway’s (2008) argument that empathy, when mediated through commodified encounters, can become a form of sentimental appropriation, where the focus is on the human experience of empathy rather than the realities of non-human lives. In the case of “Race the Wild”, the digital representation of elephants may evoke feelings of connection and concern in players, but these feelings are mediated through a gamified interface that prioritises human enjoyment and economic value over a depth or situated understanding of the animals’ lives. Decontextualising political ecologies in an economy of spectacle Using digital tracking technologies in conservation consequently represents both an opportunity and a challenge. On the one hand, these technologies provide valuable data for scientific research and can help monitor and protect endangered species. On the other hand, they also extend biopower over non-human life, as Adams (2019) has shown, enabling a form of conservation increasingly centred on control and surveillance. In their exploration of ‘conservation by algorithm’, as Adams terms it, Ghosal et al. (2015) use such insight to argue that while these technologies can enhance the efficiency and scope of conservation efforts, they risk depersonalising and decontextualising the lives of non-human species. This critique is particularly relevant to the “Race the Wild” experiment, where elephants’ movements are reduced to a series of data points that can be tracked and compared within a digital game. As well as affecting human-non-human relationships, this decontextualisation of animals can be seen to foster extractive and exploitative logics of management. Barua (2016) claims that neoliberal conservation often reimagines animals as commodities within an economy of spectacle—indeed, it is in its interest to do so. This is evident in ecotourism, where the value of wildlife is derived from their visibility and the ability of tourists to experience close encounters with them. Similarly, in the digital realm, gamification can transform wildlife into “lively capital”, where the encounter between human players and tracked animals generates economic and affective value, while the image of the animal remains endlessly trapped in infinite forms of repetition (Adams et al. 2024). These digital encounters often obscure the power dynamics and ethical considerations, presenting animals as passive participants in human-centred spectacles. In the context of “Race the Wild”, the gamification of elephant movements can be seen as an extension of this logic, where animals are enrolled into a digital economy that prioritises human enjoyment and economic gain over the well-being of the animals. How gamification may foster extractive relationships with animals can be seen in the popular game Animal Crossing: New Horizons3, which is mentioned by (Sandbrook et al. In press) in largely positive terms (see also Fisher et al. 2021). In this game, players create and manage virtual islands, engaging in activities like fishing, bug catching, and landscaping. Nevertheless, we might notice that within the setup of the game the activities described are not just for leisure; the game’s backdrop is a more extensive economic system, where nature is commodified and managed for profit. We might extrapolate that beyond encouraging players to ‘exhibit pro-conservation behaviours and attitudes (Sandbrook et al. In press), they may become habituated into mindsets that see plant and animal species as potential profit opportunities or business interests. Moreover, we might consider the game Endless Ocean4, where players explore underwater environments and interact with marine life (see Figure 3). In this game, players engage with species’ life by discovering and cataloguing different species, focusing on the immersive experience of observing and learning about marine animals in their natural habitats. Without necessarily escaping the problem with categorisation and naming, and the hierarchies of expertise this can perform, the game seems to promote exploration, observation, and a deeper appreciation for marine biodiversity, including a more nuanced and context-sensitive understanding of wildlife. As Sandbrook et al. (2015) and others have claimed, such forms of gamification can target specific audiences and complement other global biodiversity conservation aims, when done with care and critical attention.Figure 3: Screenshot from Endless OceanEven still, it is essential to consider how these tools might contribute to a form of conservation that prioritises efficiency and control over the well-being of the animals being tracked or communities who live there. This feeds into a mode of thinking about biodiversity conservation and species life that is increasingly defined in advance to a closed critique. This is perhaps more striking in other immersive games in which the ‘ecology’ is one layer, over which missions to ‘civilise’ and ‘conserve’. A potent example is Eco5, a multiplayer, online survival game where players collaborate to build a civilisation in a simulated ecosystem. The game focuses on balancing human development with environmental sustainability, as players must prevent the ecosystem from collapsing while advancing technologically to stop an impending global disaster (like a meteor). Here the geopolitical dimensions are subtle but significant, as players must consider the long-term environmental impact of their actions and how the actions are influenced by economic and political factors. While aiming to teach appreciation of human-non-human interdependence, the depictions of power in governance systems are decidedly flat, keeping inequalities relating to class, race and coloniality out of view. Collective responsibility is also imagined at the level of elites, corporations or states, thus skewing a perspective of what social change is and how it can happen. This lack of social, political, and economic context raises significant ethical concerns, particularly within the framework of political ecology. Scholars like Margulies and Karanth (2018) have critiqued conservation practices that impose human-centric values and priorities onto non-human landscapes for exacerbating conflicts between wildlife and local communities. The commodification of animal movement data in digital games risks further entrenching these dynamics, normalising the conceptualisation of species conservation in terms of digits, pixels, or capital that can be easily exchanged. While this point is overtly recognised in the article, I worry that the optimistic conclusion obscures the broader ramifications of gamification, presenting it as one axis of challenge, rather than a vector of transformation in the ways that biodiversity conservation might be, and is being, mediatised into spectacle. EXTENDING THE ARGUMENT: FROM GAMIFICATION TO DATA COLONIALISM I argue that the discussion in “Race the Wild” the to a broader and potentially more critical of how digital technologies are conservation practices. While the article focuses on the gamification of wildlife movement, there is an need to extend this of further into new of developing governance in conservation (see Adams As more conservation are to and the potential for these technologies to existing power and becomes increasingly governance in about where to resources, which species to and how to manage ecosystems are increasingly made by critical in work on gamification. This is much needed and raise further questions about and the potential for in publics to interact in gamified spaces as part of conservation efforts. For example, as become more to conservation there is a risk that they may prioritise certain species or based on economic rather than ecological or based on the spectacle value of the species in reinforcing the of conservation that scholars like Büscher (2014) and Corson et al. (2014) have A critical concept that might also be into the is ‘data that and using often from communities and becomes a new form of and In the context of digital conservation, vast of data are from wildlife tracking, often without the ecological and social of the where the data is This data is used to conservation that may prioritise economic or geopolitical over local ecological and cultural gamification into this risks reinforcing existing power dynamics, turning animals and ecosystems into units that can be for economic gain within a digital economy. game that the way that data into conservation gamification, particularly through a colonial that players might not be is by (see Figure While not using a conservation the game of wildlife and resource in the context of on game like of data by players within a that mirrors colonial where the and its wildlife are for data etc.) that contribute to and a colonial of resource survival and The game’s of wildlife as resources to be and into broader of how data collection and resource in digital spaces can help practices of control and by keeping in the Screenshot from the article at the of this provides a valuable contribution to an and research which and raise new The present offers an example of what this including much broader on the growing place of digital technologies in biodiversity conservation and what of this As this has the gamification of wildlife movement data raises significant ethical and political questions that warrant further and much deeper it be essential to extend the discussion beyond gamification to consider the broader implications of governance and data in conservation. As digital technologies to the scholars and must remain to the new potential risks and they as well as the potential to foster more and forms of human-non-human engagement. Online Wildcam Gorongosa Animal Crossing: New Endless

Agroforestry · Biodiversity · Biodiversity conservation · Biology · Computer vision · Environmental ethics · Environmental planning · Environmental resource management · Geography · Pixel · Remote sensing · Wildlife · Wildlife conservation · Computer Science · Environmental Science · Geographies of human-animal interactions · Wildlife Ecology and Conservation · Wildlife-Road Interactions and Conservation · Ecology

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